The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [161]
“Sure,” Abu Jandal said. “I’ll take a look.” He picked up the book and began looking through it.
While he appeared to earnestly study each photo—his eyebrows furrowed and his forehead wrinkled, a few seconds allotted to each—he kept shaking his head and said he knew almost none of the people. There were about sixty photos. By the end, he had only identified Osama bin Laden, Abu Hafs al-Masri, Ayman Zawahiri, and few other known operatives. Those were people he couldn’t deny knowing, given his admission that he had been Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard. Abu Hafs was, at the time of Abu Jandal’s service, bin Laden’s anointed successor.
“That’s all you recognize?” I asked, deliberately adding surprise to my voice.
“Yes, I don’t recognize anyone else, sorry,” he responded.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Please look again, my friend. Do you think I ask without knowing that you know many of these people? I’m confident you know more people. Look again.”
“Okay, I’ll look again,” he said, again trying to show that he was cooperating, and maintaining the friendly relationship we had built.
He looked slowly through the book, spending a few more seconds than before on each photo. “Sorry, there’s no one else I know.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, eyebrows raised.
“Yes.”
“Well, for friendship’s sake, would you look one more time?”
“Okay, for you I will,” he said with a smile.
He looked at picture after picture, shaking his head after examining each one. As he got about halfway through, I laughed and turned to Bob. “See?”
“What?” Abu Jandal asked somewhat nervously, trying to work out what was going on. He didn’t like being on the outside of a joke.
“I knew you wouldn’t be straight with us,” I told him. “I told Bob you wouldn’t admit to knowing people.”
“What do you mean?” Abu Jandal asked, his voice sounding a bit less confident than usual.
“Come on,” I said, “take this picture.” I pointed to a photo on the page he had been looking at. “Are you claiming you don’t know al-Sharqi?” Sharqi was an al-Qaeda alias for Shehhi, the hijacker who Quso had told us had stayed in Abu Jandal’s guesthouse.
Abu Jandal was silent, with a poker face. “Do you think I don’t know about your relationship with him?” I continued. “Remember Ramadan 1999, when he was sick in your guesthouse? And as his emir you cared for him and gave him soup and nursed him back to health?” Abu Jandal began to blush. “So do you really not know him?” I asked.
“Yes, I do know him,” he admitted sheepishly. After a pause, as if calculating the situation, he added, “Sorry.” We didn’t mention anything about Shehhi being one of the 9/11 hijackers; and Shehhi’s name had not yet been released to the press as a suspected hijacker.
“When I ask you a question, I most probably know the answer,” I told him. “I am just testing you to see if you are cooperating and being honest, as you claim you are. Now, if you don’t want to cooperate, just say so, but please don’t lie to me and waste my time by pretending that you don’t know these people.” Abu Jandal looked down, embarrassed. He had been caught lying, undermining not only his claims of cooperating but, more importantly in his book, of being a religious person—in Islam, as in other religions, lying is a sin. “Look,” I continued, “I thought you were an honest guy. Feeding someone soup is very personal. How do you think I know about it? I know about your relationships with many in this book. I didn’t fly all the way from America to interview you knowing nothing. You don’t know how many of your friends I have in my custody, or who worked for me, and how many have spoken about you. So please let’s not play games, and let’s go through this honestly.”
“Okay, okay,” Abu Jandal said.
“Let’s start at the beginning of the book,” I replied. He went through and identified one al-Qaeda operative after another. We never let on that the only person we knew he knew for certain was Shehhi. He identified, as al-Qaeda members,